Lasers in the woods

Endgames is a short
feature film about gaming and how much time you put into it. The action scenes
are suppose to illustrate scenes from within a game. That is why
there are so many different techniques of visualizing the scenes in
the film. There are the painted animations to look like something out
of a comic. Then you have 3D scenes and lastly there are live action.
The live action is what we are going to cover in this little article.

The filming of the chase
scenes took place one dark night in the woods. For the laser beams to
be visible you need to have particles in the air that can reflect
light. Therefore we had a smoke machine, with a long power cable into
the woods. Unfortunately we did not have access to a power generator.
It took a long time to shoot these short scenes because the wind and
all the smoke that the machine puffed out blew away. When we were
done with everything and came out of the forest we found the smoke
again. It filled up a whole meadow outside the forest. Apparently it
was windless precisely in this open area. The smoke machine we used
costs about 1000 SEK, about 100 EUROs, not the cheapest but not the most expensive.
Worked well for this and sends out large amounts of smoke in a short
time. It doesn't consume that much of smoke liquid either so all in
all a good little machine.

The rifle in the film is
an extremely inexpensive soft air gun. Purchased on the auction site
Tradera for 7 SEK, less than 1 EURO. The seller was less happy having
to sell the gun for so little, but those are the rules at auctions.
Sometimes you have to have some luck.

The pistol is of the more
expensive kind. A soft air gun with gas blow back so that the mantle
of the gun will move. It makes it easier to film in order to get the
realism of the gun actually shooting out a bullet. This can be done
in post production but is tedious and not at all certain that it will
look good. The muzzle flames, however, are added in post.

The homeless

Filming the homeless was a
challenge. We were out of time but then we got a cancellation from
one of the main characters, so we had to search high and low to find
a replacement. Eventually we found a substitute and was off and
running, but we had lost a couple of hours.

The fire in the jars is
genuine and it is bio-ethanol for indoor stoves. They did not burn as
long as we had hoped, so we had to refill the buckets before every
take. Despite the fires we had to have the lights switched on. A
couple of 300 Watts Arri lamps. Later on that night it started to
rain, and the water vaporized when it hit the hot lamps. We shot all
night and were done sometime around five in the morning.

You learn something from
everything you do. You never fail, you just learn. Next time you will
be able to foresee the mistakes you did the first time, and be more
prepared for the new once.